Modular Addict Helps Musicians Build One-of-a-Kind, DIY Synthesizers

At least a couple of times a day, a passerby pops into Modular Addict’s storefront on Kinnickinnic Avenue and almost immediately walks out completely perplexed. The store’s founders admit that it’s not necessarily the easiest space to grasp. “We’re a synth DIY store and hack space, the first as I know in the world,” says Tyler St Clair, though even that description probably doesn’t clear much up for most people.

Think of it as a music shop for people who build their own instruments. A synthesizer has several basic components, but by mixing and matching parts and modules—I’m simplifying a lot here, it can get quite complicated—builders can create a truly one of a kind instrument with its own signature sound.

“Basically as time went on, people were like, I don’t really care what some dude at Yamaha wants me to believe is the best way to do this,” says St Clair, who runs the operation with Logan Erickson and John Karbassi. “So, what people started doing is saying, ‘I like the filter on this keyboard, but I don’t like anything else about it. I want to use the oscillator from this keyboard,’ and so on and so forth. So all those little sections on a keyboard you can buy independently. If you go to Guitar Center and buy a keyboard, you run the risk of sounding like everybody else after a while, but by building your modular synthesis, you are effectively building your own keyboard, and it’s not going to sound like anybody else because there are so many possibilities.”

The options are quite literally limitless. St Clair points to some of the dozens of synthesizers on Modular Addict’s display rig, a dazzling spread of panels, lights and knobs. One panel is filled with Russian characters. “There’s one company that cloned an entire Russian synthesizer,” he says, before pointing to another with some bizarre coils on it. “There’s this guy in China who made this one. I don’t know what this does, but you touch it and it makes connections. And this one has code, but when they built it the code was wrong, so it started spitting out this weird shit and they kept it that way.”

The shop’s “hack space” is basically a couple tables of building stations, where enthusiasts gather to construct their gear or fix broken equipment or drum machines; Modular Addict also hosts regular community builds and synth meets. It’s fitting that the store is in an old hobby shop, because modular building is very much a hobby.

“A lot of guitarists are getting into it, because it parallels a lot of what guitarists do with pedals,” says St Clair, who also records under the moniker Stagediver and runs the Milwaukee electronic label Radiograffiti. “I have seen people come into the store who have never built anything before, they don’t really know much about what any of this does, and now it’s like you can’t get them to leave because they’re so addicted to it. And there’s definitely the psychological satisfaction of ‘Hey, I built this.’ You can take pride in knowing I didn’t just go to the store and buy this prebuilt thing from Korg or whatever. We also get a lot of hip-hop producers coming in, because they’re looking for ways not to sound like anybody else, and they can run their drums through filters to get all these different effects.”

Modular Addict does most of its business online, and it does quite a lot of it. As one of the only businesses of its kind in what’s turning out to be a rapidly growing market, the shop ships all over the world (apparently Indonesia has a thriving synth scene). But St Clair says they wanted a physical space to help turn what’s historically been an anti-social hobby—basically the musical equivalent of ham radio—into a real community. The hope, St Clair says, is that by bringing musicians together to exchange knowledge and work off of shared sounds and technology, the shop could even help the city establish its own indelible musical identity.

“We’ve always been these sort of basement-dwelling electronic guys, but we thought, ‘Let’s take our knowledge and let’s destigmatize and rebuild,’” St Clair says. “That’s our mantra here: Rebuild Milwaukee. There’s a huge electronic history here, and we wanted to be the next chapter in that history.”

Modular Addict is located at 2633 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. and online at modularaddict.com.

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